The Purpose of Gardening with Children
By Ellie Falk, CGC Youth Education Coordinator
Gardening with children is not about the tasks involved in maintaining a garden—the planting, weeding, watering, trellising, pruning and harvesting. Sure, it’s wonderful to teach them these skills, but this is not why gardening matters for kids. In fact, if gardening were to only be about the maintenance, you’d lose most kids’ interest quickly.
Gardening is a way of connecting children to nature and helping them feel comfortable outside. We typically maintain our edible gardens just well enough—with clear borders around beds, mowed grass or mulched paths to walk on, and organized plantings—that they aren’t overwhelmingly wild or unfamiliar for children who are still building their comfort in natural spaces. Building this kind of comfort isn’t just for the children’s benefit, either. Research demonstrates that when children develop this connection, they are more likely to become good stewards of the environment as they grow up. With the reality of our climate crisis, raising the next generation of adults to care for our natural world certainly matters.
Every June and July, I run our Summer Sprouts program in the Pendleton Children’s Garden with two different summer camps. Each group walks over to the garden once a week and together, we harvest, cook and eat something growing in the garden. When I plan for these programs, I think about how the children are going to interact with the garden. What is going to engage their senses or pique their curiosity? What has changed in the garden since they last saw it? In early July, I missed a few zucchinis on the plants and after the weekend came back to fruit the size of baseball bats. I turned it into a treasure hunt for the kids and they had so much fun harvesting those giants. I am confident that they will remember exactly how we grew and harvested the zucchinis in the garden, and that connection to growing their food may make eating zucchini more exciting, even for the vegetable skeptic.
Growing their own food matters for children when it comes to understanding where their food comes from and making healthier eating choices. When we cooked stir-fried greens, the children harvested kale, Swiss chard and collards. “Are we going to eat leaves?” asked one of the Summer Sprouts, clearly dismayed at the idea. But I thought, “Great, she knows the part of the plant we harvested is the leaf.” After we cooked and she tasted the stir fry, I asked her what she thought. She gave me a nod and big thumbs up. “Leaves can be good, right?”
While many of the Summer Sprouts start out readily expressing their unfiltered negative feelings about whatever recipe we are going to make that week, they have tremendous openness to trying the food once we’ve cooked it together in the garden. It seems like the process of harvesting, preparing and cooking with ingredients grown in a garden they have a connection with undoes their preconceived notions or previous experience with that food. As an educator and facilitator of these programs, witnessing this change after weeks in the garden together is the most rewarding part of my work.
Gardening in this way with children creates social connection as well. Through our activities, the Summer Sprouts work as a team to create a shared snack. One child expressed this sentiment beautifully and completely unprompted: “The best part was that we made it together.” These kinds of comments are admittedly rare, so when I hear them, I am taken aback but also so happy. I let go of all the ways things didn’t go as planned or how many times I was interrupted while giving directions and can see the larger impact of my work. Their time in the garden and cooking is developing their social and emotional skills, which is critical in our post-pandemic society after social interactions were so disrupted for several years. For them, gardening with others is a therapeutic activity.
The common theme in all the ways gardening matters for children is a fostering of connection: connection to nature, to their food and to each other. And isn’t connection what we humans need to thrive?
By offering children opportunities for positive experiences working and playing alongside others in nature, we are helping them learn, develop and flourish. Let’s not underestimate the importance this has for decades to come and for the way we shape our future.